#NEAR大涨超21%突破3美元 #Gate广场中秋团圆局 The Truth Behind NEAR’s Surge: When an Established Blockchain Starts Doing Business in Privacy Trading

On September 18, NEAR briefly reached $3.45 intraday, up more than 26% in 24 hours; just three trading days earlier, its closing price was only $2.34, representing a cumulative three-day gain of over 45%.

The market quickly labeled this rally “an assault on $3.33,” attributing it to the incentive program launched by the project. But few people broke down the contrast: the nominal value of the token rewards in this incentive program was only around $110,000, yet it drove NEAR’s market cap from $3.22 billion to $4.46 billion, adding more than $1.2 billion in market value within three days.
Clearly, rewards worth only a few hundred thousand dollars cannot support a market-cap increase of more than $1 billion. The essence of this rally is that NEAR has completed a thorough shift in narrative — it is no longer the established blockchain left over from the previous cycle, focused on sharding performance, but is becoming privacy settlement infrastructure behind cross-chain trading, turning “privacy trading” into a business with recurring revenue for the first time.

The $3.33 Incentive: A Carefully Designed “Consensus Anchor,” Not a Simple Airdrop
On September 17, NEAR officially announced that assets locked in its confidential mode (Near Intents) had surpassed $70 million, and that the first phase snapshot for the NEAR@3.33 incentive program had been completed.
The threshold for participating in this phase’s rewards was not high: users only needed to hold more than $100 in assets in a confidential account and have completed at least one confidential swap to share 333,333 milestone tokens, with each wallet able to receive at most 2% of the total.
But unlike most airdrops, these milestone tokens were not immediately transferable.
The rules were clear: only when NEAR’s three-day volume-weighted average price reached or exceeded $3.33 would the milestone tokens be converted into transferable NEAR at a 1:1 ratio. Valued at $3.33, the total nominal value of these rewards was approximately $110,000.
The mechanism was quite cleverly designed, essentially using an “options-style airdrop” to deeply bind product usage to price expectations.
The common problem with traditional airdrops is “claim and sell”; the day a snapshot is completed is often the turning point for the market. NEAR instead split the entire process into three steps: “deposit assets — receive locked rewards — meet the token-price condition and unlock them for circulation”: first using a low-threshold incentive to guide users into confidential mode and complete real transactions, bringing funds and trading volume to the product; then using the token-price unlock condition to anchor the entire market’s attention at $3.33 and establish a clear consensus around the target price.
In other words, the $110,000 was not used to “pump the price,” but to “ignite the spark” — it gave the market a clear price reference and, more importantly, redirected investors’ attention to NEAR’s core product: the Near Intents confidential trading protocol.

The Real Fundamentals: From Surviving on Gas Fees to Making Money from Trading Services
If the incentive program was the fuse, then validation of protocol revenue is the real foundation of this rally.
According to data from NEAR’s on-chain revenue dashboard, NEAR Intents generated approximately $5.01 million in total fees over the past 30 days, corresponding to protocol net revenue of approximately $1.58 million. Revenue comes from multiple channels, including frontend fees, quote-improvement gains, revenue shares from authorized partners, and private protocol partnerships, completely breaking away from the traditional public-chain revenue model that relies on Gas fees.
In addition, an on-chain verifiable buyback multisig address has accumulated approximately 1.158 million NEAR, meaning protocol revenue is now feeding back into token value and forming the initial shape of a positive cycle: “trading growth — higher revenue — buybacks supporting the token price.”
This is the most fundamental shift in the valuation logic of an established blockchain.
In the previous cycle’s blockchain narrative, the market measured a project’s value by TVL, TPS, and developer count, which were essentially all “traffic metrics.” Revenue was often secondary, and many blockchains even had to subsidize activity at a loss to inflate transaction volume. NEAR is now taking a different path: rather than competing with new blockchains on performance and ecosystem size, it is deepening its focus on the vertical scenario of “cross-chain privacy trading” and making money directly from trading demand.
When a blockchain project can deliver sustainable, monthly protocol net revenue, its valuation logic shifts from “market-cap-to-dream ratio” to “price-to-earnings ratio.” Monthly net revenue of $1.58 million corresponds to an annualized profit level of nearly $20 million, providing the most basic fundamental support for a market cap of more than $4 billion and giving this rally a foundation beyond pure narrative speculation.

An $8.21 Million Whale Trade: Privacy Is Not a Concept but a Rigid Paying Demand
Many people may question whether confidential trading is just another new bottle for the old wine of narrative-driven speculation. A large on-chain transaction on September 9 provided the most genuine answer.
Four addresses belonging to the same entity, which had been dormant for around six months, suddenly became active: they first bought approximately $33.37 million worth of ETH through CowSwap, then used 2,500 ETH to exchange for 6,601.37 ZEC through NEAR Intents, with a total transaction value of approximately $8.21 million. For this transaction, the entity paid 16.75 ETH in service fees, equivalent to approximately $42,000.
The willingness to spend $42,000 to buy “the right to remain hidden” in a single transaction precisely demonstrates large traders’ rigid demand for privacy.
In public on-chain trading pools, the direction, size, and submission time of large orders are all transparent, making them easy targets for front-running and copy trading that drives up prices; the final execution slippage could easily far exceed $42,000. Through NEAR’s confidential mode, orders enter a private shard and transaction details are not exposed to the public market, effectively providing whales with a trustless on-chain dark pool.
More notably, users completing such transactions do not even need an in-depth understanding of the NEAR blockchain itself. NEAR Intents operates behind cross-chain swaps; users only need to express the intent to “swap ETH for ZEC,” while market makers handle quote matching and settlement, with the privacy layer working invisibly. This “backend infrastructure” positioning allows it to reach all users with cross-chain trading needs, rather than being limited to the NEAR ecosystem.

Narrative Upgrade: From a Swap Tool to a Privacy Trading Account
As the market momentum builds, NEAR’s product iteration is keeping pace with the narrative. Recently, NEAR announced that perpetual contracts with liquidity provided by Hyperliquid would be integrated into confidential accounts: users can deposit assets from different blockchains and open positions using the same confidential account, while position size, entry price, and trading direction will not appear in the public trading pool.
The significance of this step goes far beyond adding a new trading category.
Previously, NEAR Intents was more like a “cross-chain swap tool” — users completed a swap and left, making it a one-time service with low user retention. Perpetual contracts, by contrast, are a position-based product: they retain margin and generate ongoing fees, while users’ funds and trading behavior accumulate in their accounts.
This means NEAR Intents has officially evolved from a “trading tool” into a “privacy trading account”: users’ cross-chain assets, swap needs, and contract trades can all be completed within this privacy account. It is no longer the endpoint of a single transaction, but the entry point to an entire trading ecosystem. The ceiling for revenue, user stickiness, and the amount of capital retained will all open up new possibilities.

The Essence of an Old Coin’s New Surge Is Finding “Differentiation That Makes Money”
Looking back at NEAR’s surge over these three days, the $110,000 incentive was the catalyst, the whale trade was supporting evidence, the integration of perpetual contracts provided room for imagination, and the core was that it successfully shifted its narrative track.
In the past, the market’s perception of NEAR remained stuck in the era of “Ethereum killers” and sharding blockchains. Like many dormant older projects, it had no new funds without a new story. Now, it has found a precise differentiated track in “cross-chain privacy settlement,” and has not stopped at the conceptual level: it has demonstrated real protocol revenue, verifiable large-scale demand, and a continuously evolving product roadmap.
Of course, this rally is not without risks. In the short term, if the three-day average price holds above $3.33, the unlocking of milestone tokens could create periodic selling pressure; over the medium to long term, the compliance boundaries of confidential trading, the sustainability of large-transaction growth, and the ramp-up speed of the perpetual-contract business will all determine how far this narrative can go.
But for all established blockchains struggling through the cycle, NEAR’s rally offers a valuable reference: amid the proliferation of blockchain narratives and cutthroat competition over performance, rather than telling grand stories about a “world computer,” it is better to find a genuine vertical demand and refine it into a business that can keep making money. After all, in the crypto market, a story that makes money is the story that stands the test of time.$NEAR